


Underneath the Rotting Pizza

by Rhaeluna



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death Fix, Coping with Death, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Garden Bisexuals, Ifalna Lives, Midgar (Compilation of FFVII), Midgar is Hell, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:07:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23778127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhaeluna/pseuds/Rhaeluna
Summary: The mechanical behemoth that is Midgar has left Elmyra in dark, but two new connections may help her find the way back to the light.
Relationships: Aerith Gainsborough & Elmyra Gainsborough, Elmyra Gainsborough/Ifalna
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27





	Underneath the Rotting Pizza

**Author's Note:**

> FFVII remake got me feeling the old feels again
> 
> Apologies in advance for potentially inciting more Aeris/Aerith discourse

The darkness of the Midgar slums is a special, charnel-like dark that seeps into the volatile cracks of all who live there. Depression and refuse alike are kin within its miasma: rusting, overworked trains; cracking water pipes; the ever-hastening inertia of entropy rotting the very bones of its people. To its residents it’s almost as if Midgar has stood for all time. The acidic sphere of its influence reaches deep into the past where it rips and bleeds with the same ferocity as it thunders ahead into the elderly future of an asthmatic planet. The crags and valleys outside the city’s high, humming steel walls have remained dry and ashen for as long as anyone can remember. Shopkeepers and SOLDIERs alike whispered that surely nothing ever grew on the spot that became Midgar; there would be no point. For once Midgar had clawed itself gasping smog into the world any life living there would have faced its doom anyways. The land had always been dead, for life, past and future alike, seemed futile. 

It was within this darkness that Elmyra Gainsborough struggled to remain alive. The winding, callous alleys and dilapidated iron of the industrial underbelly birthed her from their shared womb of ichor as if she’d been carved of dirt and stone. Her eyes opened for the first time amidst discarded televisions and the murky ambitions of those above. Mud and rust flowed in her veins, and it wasn’t long before her fingertips were scabbed with the toll of life.

Her parents vanished one after another into the depths of this darkness. Addiction, falsehoods, and nihilism tingled up their backs like long-dead spectres and dragged them off under the cover of moonlight. Elmyra was young enough that she didn’t remember their going. Soon after she became hungry, real hungry, and spent the first journey of her life trying to satiate her young stomach. By the time Elmyra ate her first filling meal she was six years old, and had long been thrust alone into a world beyond childhood.

Her struggle was a caterpillar’s plight within a trench of sludge. To engage with the other lost, crying souls writhing about her was to risk life and limb at every conversation. She met some who talked up the wrong folks, trekked down the wrong alley, and were never seen by friend or foe alike again. Thieving, friendship, and luck got Elmyra only so far, but by them she survived long enough to reach a facsimile of true adulthood. Her knees were covered in scars and her eyes were crusted blacker than the burning machine oil of Shinra’s lumbering monstrosities. 

It was in her 24th year when she met the man of kind repute in Sector 3. He found her beaten and bloodied by the local security force and took her back to his home, a modest hideaway surrounded by murky water in Sector 5. When she woke on his couch the next morning she nearly killed him with a shard of glass hidden in her boot.

After a few days of recuperating the two lonely survivors had taken a shining to each other, and the man offered Elmyra his home. His rooms were warm; his linens were clean. He made his money as a grunt: hardly respectable, but it put bread on the table. Elmyra had been scraping by for so long, barely alive, that she couldn’t bring herself to refuse. The man had brought her out of the muck and spirited him away to a safety beyond the smoke and steel. And perhaps Elmyra had planned to leave again in the thick of night, but those comforts that she’d only ever heard about in stories held her in place. As did the man’s unconditional love. His love was so fine that she wanted nothing more than to lock it away in a jar and warm her leathery flesh by its ethereal heat. 

The man became her husband, and Elmyra took to filling the loose dirt surrounding her new shared home with the green life of growth. Flowers red, blue, purple, and orange flourished in the ground under her touch. Her hands, once so twitchy, became calm. No longer did she sleep with a dagger under her pillow. The walls she’d so carefully constructed to protect her fetid heart were in time overgrown with stunning wildflowers. 

Elmyra was safe and happy, lighter than air. But when the war with Wutai broke out and burned firestorms into Midgar’s choked capillaries her gentle happiness plunged back into the smoky dark. Shinra took her husband, as she knew they would. It was his duty. 

Long months passed and she feared every day that he’d been taken forever by a stray bullet or feral beast, or consumed by the ravenous machine of greed that lurked under the skin of it all. Sleep escaped her in the bed that she’d grown accustomed to sharing. 

The flowers withered, and no amount of loving coaxing could rouse their vitality again. Soon autumn had arrived and still Elmyra received no word. The foul, poisoned soil dragged her green paradise back into its writhing, undulating spite. The man who she’d loved was likely dead, his body buried beneath so many others, though Elmyra fought to suppress such thoughts.

Midgar is often the only mortuary many lives will ever know. They are born from the planet into the city’s belly where acids corrode bone and mind until nought but ash remains. But even in this impossible garden do plants find stubborn ways to grow. From cracked femurs did a sprout of struggle feed on discarded marrow and discover the nutrients of life.

April arrived in the undead city and Elmyra received a generic typed letter signed in hastily scrawled ink. Her husband was alive and returning, it said. He’d be on the noon train into Sector 7 the coming morning. 

The next day Elmyra raced to the station without bothering to tie her shoes. She parted crowds of shamblers with trembling hands and ducked under stalls of freeze dried food scraps. The station emerged from shadow in a city that has never truly known daylight. The rumbling serpent wound through its long, echoing tunnels and came to a growling stop before Elmyra’s eyes. The doors opened. Her husband did not appear. Still she waited with her breath held tight. Hoping. Weary men and women stepped onto the platform and shuffled by, their grey eyes downcast. 

Soon enough the doors of the behemoth slid closed once more and it streaked off into its iron caves. Elmyra stood alone.

Years of practiced self preservation instinct kept Elmyra on her feet and stayed her tears. Perceived weakness was an exploitable luxury available only to the truly comfortable. Perhaps he’d been reassigned. Mail wasn’t instantaneous for someone of her meager living. He wasn’t necessarily dead, she told herself, of course not, but standing there in the false sun surrounded by wind chill her creeping doubts came alive with self-destructive mirth against her wishes. Soon she would spiral.

It was the unexpected voice of a young girl that drew Elmyra from her mourning.

“Mommy, please stay awake!”

It was a broken voice. A voice that did not want to be found by the lumbering industrial shadows lurking in every alley and corporate building in the city. The desperate sound floated to Elmyra from behind her at the station’s front entrance. 

“You can’t go to sleep,” the girl said, “the scientists will get us!” 

It was a sound that Elmyra knew best as the sound that she herself had made as a child struggling in a land that wanted to eat her alive. Perhaps she’d never made the sound aloud, for begging was too dangerous a prospect to trust any but the most loyal confidant with, a resource that Elmyra had always lacked, but she’d made it to herself under the cover of darkness, alone and safe for hastily guarded moments. Lost in the thunder of machines. 

It was a voice that Elmyra would not stand for. She descended the steps of the rickety station, her grief for but a moment lost, and turned the corner. A girl of seven or eight was shaking the shoulders of a woman Elmyra’s age. Dark stains of blood fresh and old were scattered in patches across her frayed dress. The girl, hearing Elmyra’s approach, startled and ducked behind her mother. 

“Would you like help?” Elmyra asked.

The girl did not answer, but her eyes glimmered with the primal Midgar fear that Elmyra knew only too well. A street light flickered at their backs. It was the mother, long-haired and beautiful even when doused in filth, who spoke.

“You there! I am not long for this world. My death is coming and I can’t run anymore. My daughter, this girl, is Aeris, and she is my darling joy. I beg you to look after her now for there is no longer anyone else living for me to ask.” 

The woman coughed into her hand: a wet, violent sound. Her cracked palm came away bloody and slick. The girl shook her mother’s shoulders again but the woman did not respond. She was beyond comforting. Elmyra bristled. She thought of her husband and remembered the warmth of having him safe and by her side, banishing the lonely darkness. 

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Elmyra said to the mother and child, “your wounds look severe alright, but you’re not out the door yet. Don’t you dare leave your poor girl alone in this terrible place. Come now.” And without stopping to consider the mother’s retort Elmyra lifted her to her feet and held her weight so the three of them might wind back through the dark maze of slums to the green home. 

The woman’s wounds were quite bad. “How did she sustain these?” Elmyra asked Aeris by candlelight. They were all tucked away in the spare bedroom, a hefty box of first aid supplies spilled out over the floor beside the bed where the mother lay. Aeris still hadn’t said much, and seemed to prefer standing like a silent sentinel at her mother’s side. Now, however, she spoke.

“It was the scientists. They kept us prisoner in their high tower and made us do terrible things.” An awful shadow of memory flashed behind the child’s eyes. “We escaped, but they didn’t like that. Mommy got hurt. She stepped in front of them when they tried to shoot me. Oh please Miss Elmyra, you have to save her! Is she going to die? I don’t want to be alone.”

Elmyra frowned, the weight of life heavy upon the creases in her lips. “I will do what I can. Now go get some sleep.” 

“No, mommy needs me here.”

“Alright then. Do what you will.” 

In the end the wounds were not lethal. Sheer luck and strength of spirit had kept the woman alive. Elmyra removed the few bullets in her arms and legs and patched and sewed where it was needed. It was the first time that Elmyra had ever treated gunshot wounds that were not her own.

She couldn’t help but admire the woman’s courage and the ferocity of love that lingered about her even in an unconscious state. Her skin was still warm despite the blood loss. Her hair felt soft to the touch, and her lips were full. The curves she had were exquisite, and Elmyra found herself embarrassed by her own thoughts as she worked. It was rare that she thought of anyone at all in such a way, and rarer still for it to be a woman. A pang of loss quivered in her brow and she thought of her husband surrounded on all sides by SOLDIERs and blood. 

“Girl,” she said, “what is your mother’s name?” Elmyra finished her bandaging and drew up an old comforter to the woman’s shoulders. 

“Ifalna,” said Aeris.

Elmyra nodded, satisfied. “She’ll live, I think, though I can’t say how long she’ll sleep. I need to retire now, but you’re welcome to my pantry and stores and free to sleep wherever and whenever you grow tired.” 

Aeris cradled Ifalna’s hand in her own. “Is this place safe?”

Elmyra smiled. “As safe as it can be within the bowels of hell,” she said, and left the room. 

Days passed but Ifalna did not wake. Her wounds mended and brilliant color returned to her skin but she might as well have been dead for all that she moved. Elmyra checked in on her every few hours. Aeris, dedicated to remain by her mother’s side as she was, soon grew restless and instead took to hounding Elmyra’s steps from a safe distance. She watched her cook, quiet and still, her eyes alight with hunger. That first morning Elmyra had cried out when she found the depths of her food stores and pickles raided and strewn out over the kitchen. Aeris was tucked away in the pots and pans cupboard snoring with a full belly. Even several meals later her fire hadn’t dimmed. Perhaps this was the first access the girl had ever had to a good meal. 

“What is that?” Aeris asked as she pointed to a rose in one of Elmyra’s garden beds. “I’ve never seen anything so delicate and red.” 

“A flower,” said Elmyra, “have you never seen one before?” She dug her fingers into the warm earth for a potato shoot that she’d lost track of. 

“No, there weren’t any in the scientists’ tower. There were pictures of some, but none like that.” 

Elmyra frowned. “Where did you live before Shinra captured you?” 

“Nowhere.”

Over time Elmyra found a light in the girl, something she’d found fading in herself since the disappearance of her husband. She still had yet to receive word of his whereabouts, and perhaps in response her camaraderie with Aeris grew with each passing day. She taught her the few card games she knew and how to cheat at them. She drummed the basics of kitchen etiquette into the girl’s head after the clumsy lass cut her knuckle while helping with dinner. She even took her outside and showed her the basics of her improvised slum stick fighting. The warmth they shared stayed the steel clutches of darkness in Elmyra’s heart, at least for a few lingering, blissful moments. 

“I’m sorry,” Aeris said one day, bursting out the front door of the green home and over to Elmyra’s side in the gardens. “I’m so sorry.” Her eyes and cheeks were red and wet with tears. 

Elmyra dropped her spade and without thinking drew the shrinking, sobbing girl into her arms. “What’s wrong?” She asked. “Why are you sorry?” For a moment she feared for the structural integrity of her house. 

Aeris sniffled and cuddled close to her guardian. “Someone you love just died. He went quickly into the shadow, the planet told me so. I’m so, so sorry!” 

Elmyra was confused by the child’s words, but comforted her all the same. It was only on the following day when she received news of her husband’s death through another generic print-type letter that the truth of Aeris’ words became clear. He’d been killed in action, just as she’d feared, and bled out from a gunshot wound in a forgotten glen outside Wutai. 

Elmyra fled to her rejuvenated gardens and wailed into the uncaring steel sky. Aeris hid from sight, a youthful wiseness about her. Elmyra’s sanctuary, once his sanctuary, was now hers in both spirit and in title. She hated it. She’d loved him; perhaps not in the way that he loved her, but she’d loved him just the same. He’d taken her in. He’d made sure that she would never want again for a warm bed like so many children she’d known in her youth who didn’t survive to become adults. The darkness slithered about her heart, but it could not squeeze her, bleed her, for in her sorrow she was also overcome with grateful joy. 

The next morning Elmyra was awoken from her tangled, nightmarish slumber by the touch of a gentle hand upon her shoulder. The electric morning light beamed in through her open window. She opened her eyes to see Ifalna standing over her, a wry smile upon her lips.

“You were crying in your sleep,” she said, “I wanted to check on you.”

Elmyra sniffled and wiped the wet away from her eyes. “I’m sorry. My husband died yesterday.” She sat up in bed with Ifalna’s help. The woman was strong despite her slight, malnourished frame. 

“I know. Aeris told me. I’m sorry you had to hear it like that. The planet tells her things sometimes, as it does me. I was asleep so long and saw so many wonderful things; I ought to share them with you soon. My daughter and I were taken by Shinra because of these connections.” She sat down on Elmyra’s bed. “Thank you very much for taking us in. We are intruders to your life but from what Aeris has said you’ve been a saint to us both regardless.” 

Elmyra remembered the day she’d first arrived at the green home. “I had to.” 

Ifalna nodded in approval. “I’m glad. Would you like some breakfast? Aeris is already digging into what we both made for you. I hope you don’t mind that we took advantage of your cookware and stores to make up a thank you surprise.” 

“Not at all.” 

The two women shared a breakfast over the sounds of birds chirping and Aeris tearing into an omelette. When she was done she ran between their legs playing some unknown child’s game, her voice trill with happiness. Watching Ifalna with her daughter brought a smile to Elmyra, though it was twinged with a still-fresh sorrow. “I know you just woke up and made that speech about feeling indebted,” Elmyra told her guests as they cleaned the dishes, “but don’t feel like you have to up and leave. You’re welcome for as long as you like.” The radiance that appeared on Ifalna and Aeris’ faces dulled the darkness crawling within Elmyra’s veins. 

Days passed, and Elmyra allowed herself to sink into the joys of new company despite her ache of loss. Aeris taught Ifalna the games that Elmyra had tutored her in and then proceeded to swindle her own mother out of the entire stack of fake money that she’d made. Elmyra cackled with mirth despite herself.

“Are you sure you’re not tired of us yet?” Ifalna asked after two weeks of company. They stood in a park covered half in rubble.

“Not at all,” replied Elmyra with a smile.

Together the three women sank their hands into the Earth, working the garden until it glowed bright with color. They wandered the slum markets together and took turns keeping a watchful eye on Aeris. They ran into a few tight spots, only to be expected within the dark underbelly, but escaped through wit and deft hands. Elmyra and Ifalna swung Aeris between them as they strode home with fresh breads and rich sauces in their basket, a victory earned after a sprint from metal death.

The rotten stink of the city faded. The encroaching death that Elmyra saw in every shadow grew weak and dispirited. She said as much to Ifalna during one of their late night conversations over tea. Aeris was long since put to bed.

“That’s wonderful. It sounds like my daughter and I bring joy to your life.” 

“You do.” Elmyra spoke with scarlet cheeks. The whiskey she’d slipped into her tea must have been getting to her. “Perhaps it isn’t proper to be so happy after the loss of my husband, but in a way I’ve been mourning him since he first left for the front. It’s had time to fade.” The women sat at opposite ends of the living room couch.

“It’s okay to be happy, you know, even when circumstances are terrible. I’m glad that my daughter and I do you good; we both love it here but I feel awful that we don’t contribute much. And our very presence puts you in danger.”

“You don’t have to contribute anything,” Elmyra said as she scooted closer on the couch, “In fact, just having you here is enough. More than enough!” She felt foolish now, as if her words were not her own. “I said you can stay as long as you like and that’s still true. You don’t have to leave.” They’d deal with Shinra when the time came. In truth, and Elmyra herself was only just beginning to realize this, she didn’t want them to leave at all. A new growth was taking root in her weary heart: a seed of love nurtured in an iron garden. “I care for you.” 

“As I do for you, my green-thumbed protector,” Ifalna said. Was that a bashful expression that Elmyra saw, or simply a trick of the light? 

Something changed that evening, though Elmyra was hard-pressed to describe what. Her thoughts were still a mess, hardly orderly, and it took some time for her to organize her feelings and wants. She began to spend even more time with Ifalna and insisted on putting aside pockets of time within which to be quiet and alone together, though she chased these moments without quite knowing entirely why. Ifalna was far better at making time for them than Elmyra was (she could rarely say no to anything Aeris desired). The women dueled in chess over drinks and would reshape the very landscape of the garden. Ifalna took Elmyra on walks in the twilight hour through the safer parts of the undercity and Elmyra would return the favor by baking her companion’s favorite cookies.

She would sit entranced in the vibrant life of the garden as Ifalna sang to her and to the flowers. It was an old melody caked in history. “My gift to you,” Ifalna would say with a wicked smile before getting up close to Elmyra and stroking her cheek. It made Elmyra’s breath doing something obscene. They shared secrets and stories, fables and songs, and Elmyra made herself vulnerable despite the cries of her anxiety and let the other woman into her wrought-iron heart. 

“Are you growing tired of me yet?” Ifalna would ask without weight. It had become their running joke. “You can ask us to leave anytime, remember.” This time they were sharing lunch in the false sun of the rotten metropolis when the jest came back around. Ifalna had just recited a ballad of the Cetra.

“I haven’t. I won’t.”

Ifalna shrunk in on herself ever so slightly. Suddenly her words carried a great heft. “Are you sure?” Elmyra pulled her into a hug.

“Stay. I want you to stay. I keep saying it and I’ll keep on saying it until you know it as you know the tales of your forebearers.” 

Ifalna let out a great sigh and leaned into Elmyra’s touch. “Okay. Okay, yes. Thank you. Is this okay?” She asked and gestured between them. Elmyra nodded. “I wanted to check.” It was more okay than Elmyra had the capacity to put into words.

Ifalna had been awake and well for five months when, alone in the darkness of night, Elmyra put the pieces of broken glass and hard iron together in her mind. At first she was overwhelmed with guilt, but as she sat by the pool of now-clear water that flowed into her garden’s deep roots and contemplated her situation she realized there was no need. Her husband would have wanted her to be happy in whatever form that took. And, as it was often said amongst underbelly rats, in the darkness of Midgar one would be wise to grab ahold of all the happiness that they can carry.

Elmyra returned to the green home with a bouquet of flowers. Iflana stood up from the table and her writings. She looked serious. 

“I have something to tell you--” She stopped, and saw the flowers in Elmyra’s trembling grip. 

“T-These are for you,” she said. She’d never been good at this part.

Ifalna took them with a knowing smile. “Thank you, sweetheart.” How long had she been calling her that? Elmyra didn’t know. Maybe it had been the hint hiding in plain sight that she’d needed. A silence passed between them. “I just wanted to tell you that Aeris wants to start calling you mama. How would you feel about that?”

And Elmyra laughed. “I would love that. Couldn’t be more brilliant an idea.” 

“Are you sure?” Ifalna stepped closer.

“Yes, a thousand times yes.” 

“Good.”

And before Elmyra could pull in a deep breath of relief and joy she was being dragged upstairs to her bedroom by the woman she loved. They tumbled onto the mattress giggling like shy teenagers. Ifalna was quick to pull them close and tight, but it was Elmyra who held them there.

A quick succession of knocks on the door woke them up the next morning from within a tangle of sheets. “Hey!” Aeris cried, “do I have two moms now?” 

Elmyra sighed against the naked skin of Ifalna’s throat. “We should get up and make her breakfast,” she said.

Ifalna smirked and pulled Elmyra into a kiss. “She’s your daughter now too, you do it.” 

The darkness of Midgar is all-consuming. Like life itself it reaps all that it sows and gives no mind to whether those seeds were planted in quiet submission or bloody violence. It is a graveyard without end, a register of innumerable crossed-out names overseen by an uncaring king of rotting metal and selfish lies. But between its two distant points, a birth from pitch and the return to pitch, there lies the opportunity to grow a garden, however transient, from a bed of corpses.


End file.
